Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of reports from the British Antarctic Survey on the effect of climate change on Antarctic ice sheets; and if he will make a statement.

The evidence gathered by the British Antarctic Survey shows significant changes in the Antarctic ice sheet that have occurred due to human-induced climate change, and natural phenomena, over recent years. Reports produced by the British Antarctic Survey form an important contribution to reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Antarctic ice sheet contribution to sea level rise has been growing in recent years and represents a significant fraction of the total. The recent IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C states that instabilities exist for the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which could result in multi-metre rises in sea level over timescales of centuries to millennia. According to the IPCC there is “medium confidence” that these instabilities could be triggered at around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

Satellite observations show that since 2002, the Antarctic ice sheet has been losing 127 billion tonnes of mass per year, and that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report states that the average rate of ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet has likely increased from 30 gigatonnes per year over the period 1992-2001, to 147 gigatonnes per year over the period 2002 to 2011.

These findings emphasise the importance of international collaborative research, such as the £20 million UK-US International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration in Antarctica, to understand its ice sheet stability and potential impacts on future global sea-level rise.

The IPCC will publish a Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate later this year, which will include an up-to-date assessment of observed and projected changes in the Antarctic region. Once published, we will respond to these findings in due course.